Officials in the town of Kalundborg have long touted the 800-year-old local church, with its five towers, as a must-see attraction. The Vor Frue Kirke didn’t draw hordes of tourists, however, since the Danish community of 16,000 sits far off the beaten track, 62 miles from Copenhagen.
But now the world has landed on Kalundborg’s doorstep, turning it from quiet outpost to boomtown. An influx of newcomers has been drawn by something much more modern: a multibillion-dollar expansion spree funded by Novo Nordisk, the Danish drug manufacturer of the breakthrough diabetes and obesity treatments Ozempic and Wegovy.
Seen from the office window of Kalundborg’s longtime mayor, Martin Damm, a forest of cranes now dwarfs the church towers (though Damm makes sure to point them out). On gouged-out plots of land, floodlit after dark, thousands of construction workers toil around the clock to finish four new and upgraded Novo factories, or to pave sidewalks for three new neighborhoods to accommodate thousands of new residents. Other workers will soon finally break ground on a new highway to Copenhagen—something for which the town has pushed for 30 years, according to Damm.
The Ozempic and Wegovy craze, of course, is felt far beyond tiny Kalundborg. Those drugs have turned Novo Nordisk into a global powerhouse, with $42 billion in sales last year, for a while making it Europe’s most valuable company. But the speed and scale of its impact is perfectly captured, in miniature, in the town’s blazing-fast expansion. Since 2021, Novo Nordisk has committed to spending 65 billion Danish kroner (nearly $9.5 billion) this decade to boost production of raw pharmaceutical ingredients in Kalundborg. The company has manufactured insulin in the town since 1969, but the mammoth new facilities will far outstrip those factories.
At his desk, Damm, 62, grapples with issues he never imagined when he became mayor 15 years ago: He must integrate new residents who have arrived from as far afield as Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, and Damascus to work (most for Novo Nordisk) and find places to live and Danish lessons. He’s creating an international school for their children, set to open in September.
Five gleaming shovels sit propped against the office wall, mementos from a common mayoral duty these days: ground-breaking ceremonies. Damm says the town has added 1,000 new jobs annually for four consecutive years. Even feeding the newcomers is complicated, he says, citing a food outlet near his office that recently served 17,500 hot dogs during a single month. Rush-hour traffic—a new concept in Kalundborg—is “crushing.”
A few blocks away, a sign bolted to the fence around an empty lot advertises future homes, listing a number for prospective tenants to contact. Damm says they ought to call quickly, or risk losing out. “Everything is already rented out, before it is finished,” he says, in a tone of disbelief.
In one sense, the Kalundborg growth boom is driven, and financed, by Americans—by far the biggest market for Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster drugs. Novo Nordisk, founded in 1923, was long known primarily as a producer of insulin. Ozempic—an injectable form of the molecule semaglutide, which mimics the human GLP-1 hormone and was invented by Novo Nordisk scientists—was approved in 2017 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat Type 2 diabetes, a condition that affects an estimated 38 million Americans.
Since Ozempic also led to significant weight loss, it spurred explosive off-label use among clinically obese Americans—as well as Elon Musk and other moneyed celebrities. In 2021, the FDA approved Ozempic’s close twin, Wegovy, specifically for obesity, sending semaglutide demand soaring; still, for many, “Ozempic” has become shorthand for the new class of weight-loss wonder drugs.
Novo’s revenues surged 26% in 2024, yielding net profits of about $14.6 billion. Together, Ozempic and Wegovy generated about $26 billion in sales, according to the company’s financial report in February; American consumers accounted for more than 71% of the company’s obesity-drug sales. The FDA has approved Ozempic to treat heart diseases as well. “Novo took about 40 years to reach 5 million patients in the U.S.; it’s gone to 10 million just in the last couple of years,” says Dave Moore, Novo’s executive vice president for U.S. operations.
The economic effects of this semaglutide wave have rippled far beyond Kalundborg. The sales have become a major economic force in Novo’s tiny homeland of Denmark, whose population of 6 million is smaller than that of New York City. In the U.S., a huge factory expansion, with buildings that stretch half a mile, has broken ground in Clayton, N.C., and in December, Novo Holdings bought New Jersey drug manufacturer Catalent for $11.7 billion, giving the company three more factories with which to meet demand.
It’s hard to predict how much faster or higher Novo’s obesity drug sales will rise. The patent on semaglutide expires in the U.S. in 2032. Yet Moore downplays the mounting threat from competitors like industry leader Eli Lilly. There is room for several obesity-drug manufacturers in the U.S. alone, he says, while other countries remain largely untapped. In March, a study funded by the Gates Foundation concluded that most of the world’s adults will be clinically obese by 2050. Says Moore: “We are just getting started.”
Still, Novo Nordisk must grapple with the question: What comes after the Ozempic boom? With an almost bottomless pot of resources from blockbuster obesity drugs, can its scientists crack diseases that have dogged researchers for years—Alzheimer’s, sickle cell anemia, maybe intractable cancers?
In numerous interviews in Denmark, Novo executives talked about what the future might hold. They caution that breakthroughs often come unexpectedly—much as semaglutide, which was created to treat diabetes, became a blowout obesity drug. Executive vice president Henrik Wulff, who heads Novo Nordisk’s product supply division, believes semaglutide will lead to “a whole new class of treatments.” He gestures to a wall of blurry black-and-white portraits of Novo’s founders, who commercialized insulin in the 1920s—a revolution in diabetes treatment. Semaglutide, he says, feels like the most pivotal change in the company “maybe since those guys up there.”
The hunt for the next moonshot has begun. That much was clear when Fortune visited the circular, skylit corporate headquarters, in Copenhagen’s Bagsværd suburb; and Novo Nordisk Foundation, in its art-filled waterfront building site several miles away.
While they’re separate entities, the company and the foundation are tightly intertwined: The foundation receives more than 25% of the company’s dividends, and it controls 70% of voting shares, effectively allowing it to make crucial strategic decisions—and block any corporate takeover. Kasim Kutay, CEO of Novo Holdings, which manages $187 billion in assets, sits on the company’s board. And until 2021, the foundation’s CEO, Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, was Novo Nordisk’s chief scientist. He helped persuade a skeptical board to invest heavily in obesity treatments: Today, a 3D-printed semaglutide molecule sits proudly on a display shelf in his office.
The foundation has doubled its grants and investments in the past five years, to about $1.45 billion in 2024. It’s now one of the world’s three biggest health foundations, and unlike the Gates Foundation, which is set up to expire sometime after Bill and Melinda Gates die, the Novo foundation will operate in perpetuity. Kutay says Novo Holdings is planning to invest about $5 billion a year, rising to $7 billion a year by 2030.
Given that pool of resources, I ask, what limits are there to Novo’s hunt for its next revolutionary breakthrough? “Well, human biology,” Kutay answers, with a wry laugh. He says that while it’s not clear which discoveries will work, surplus finances and disruptive technology suggest that successes are within reach. “We are unquestionably in a golden era of innovation,” he says.
The strongest clue to the potential disruption lies a five-minute walk away, in the temporary digs of the foundation’s newest major investment: the Danish Center for AI Innovation (DCAI). Its centerpiece is a $100 million supercomputer, recently ranked among the world’s fastest. That project began after Novo’s foundation and Nvidia agreed last year to work together on quantum computing, health data, and biotech. Within six months, the AI supercomputer had opened. Roughly the size of a basketball court, it contains 1,528 H100 Tensor chips from Nvidia. “We are like a living lab for [Nvidia],” Thomsen says.
The supercomputer, named Gefion, after the ancient Norse goddess of prosperity, was unveiled in October by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who flew to Copenhagen for a plugging-in ceremony alongside King Frederik of Denmark and the center’s new CEO, Nadia Carlsten, an American engineer and a former executive at Amazon Web Services’ quantum computing center in Pasadena, among other postings. Onstage, Huang seemed delighted. “All the researchers are going to be clamoring for time on the system,” he told an audience of dignitaries and Novo executives, calling the computer “a factory of intelligence.” Added Huang: “We are inventing something fundamentally new.”
DCAI will charge businesses and researchers to use the supercomputer, with academic projects paying cut-rate prices. The center will focus on life sciences and health, and is vetting requests to make sure they have “good intent,” Carlsten tells me over lunch in Copenhagen. She says pitches from aspirants are starting to accelerate; all companies with worthwhile goals, she claims, will be considered as clients—even an archrival like Eli Lilly.
For Novo itself, the supercomputer could provide a clear path to its next breakthrough. “The potential for AI generally in drug development is enormous,” Carlsten says. New drugs currently take between 10 and 15 years and billions of dollars to develop, from initial research through bringing them to market. “This is going to really change that,” she says. “The whole process will be compressed.”
Thomsen credits the Ozempic bonanza for the Nvidia partnership. The success of GLP-1 drugs has boosted not only Novo Nordisk’s resources but its clout; the foundation’s CEO cites the suddenly large number of leaders requesting meetings with him at the World Economic Forum in Davos every January, something he says was previously unimaginable. “Jensen would not have come to us four years ago,” he says. “It is not just a feel-good thing. It enables us to have more impact on global challenges.”
$26 billionGlobal sales of Novo Nordisk’s top GLP-1 drugs, Ozempic and WeGovy, in 2024
Source: Company filings
That impact is beginning to be felt around Denmark. Up a narrow wooden staircase in the health and medical sciences faculty building at the University of Copenhagen, Eske Willerslev, a renowned Danish evolutionary biologist and professor, has settled into his new office, having returned home after nearly a decade at Cambridge University. Novo’s lavish research funding, he says, was the irresistible draw. Willerslev, 53, received about $82 million from Novo’s foundation to run a seven-year study on ancient food cultivation, in partnership with 16 universities across the world, in order to examine how people centuries ago survived cataclysmic climate shocks.
He has spent decades accumulating a vast quantity of data—including soil samples from Greenland dating back more than 2 million years, when the Arctic was far warmer. All that data will be fed into the Gefion supercomputer, allowing Willerslev’s team to finally analyze the results. “What would have taken three years before will now take one week,” Willerslev says.
In Willerslev’s mind, the massive resources for research will have a big effect on Denmark, allowing the country to attract top researchers, and giving it outsize influence in science—especially, he points out, since funding for the U.S. National Institutes of Health has been cut. “We are in a very, very unique position,” he says. “It is really a huge leverage for Denmark.”
Novo is not the only large company in Denmark, which is also home to the brewer Carlsberg and shipping giant Maersk. But semaglutide has brought a flood of revenues into the economy at a scale that few other companies in other countries can match. Denmark recently increased its forecasted GDP growth for this year to 2.9%, up from 2.2%, with the extra due almost entirely to Novo Nordisk. In 2023, the central bank estimated, Denmark’s economy wouldn’t have grown at all without its drug exports. “If you just look at GDP, we are much higher growth than neighboring countries,” Las Olsen, chief economist of Denmark’s largest financial institution, Danske Bank, said in a report in December. “That’s due to the pharmaceutical industry, and Novo Nordisk in particular.”
To harness its leverage, Novo must keep pace with fierce competition in the obesity-drug market. Eli Lilly has stockpiled oral versions of its GLP-1 drugs, readying them for sale next year, while Pfizer is running trials of a similar treatment. Novo—whose stock dropped in March after a new obesity drug caused less weight loss than it had predicted—says it plans to submit an oral version of its semaglutide drugs for FDA approval before July.
Increased production is crucial to beating the competition. Nowhere in Denmark is that effort as evident as in little Kalundborg. On an icy February morning, about 20 students crowded into a room in the town’s Helix Lab, a modern glass-and-wood building largely funded by Novo’s foundation. Helix opened in 2022 as a biotech robotics and research facility, designed to train enough high-skilled workers for Danish industry in general—and for the town’s fast-rising factories in particular.
The lab’s director, Anette Birck, says companies, including Novo Nordisk, keep a close eye on the lab for potential hires. Students largely commute from Copenhagen. But this year, most have opted to stay after their training, finding plentiful job offers in Kalundborg. “We were really amazed and really proud,” says Birck.
Assimilating newcomers is a growing preoccupation for Kalundborg, which badly needs them to stay. The municipality has a four-person “settlement team,” which tracks new arrivals, attempting to create a sense of belonging in a small, remote town with long, dark winters, few activities, and a language that many don’t speak.
One morning in Kalundborg, six women—all spouses of men recently hired by Novo Nordisk—gathered to discuss their challenges. Over coffee and Danish pastries, all described struggling to knit together new lives. “In Syria, if a new neighbor moves in, we immediately go over to meet them,” says Sara Saleh, who quit her job in Damascus last December to follow her husband, an engineer, to Kalundborg. “That is not part of this culture.”
But new arrivals are also bringing their own cultures to Kalundborg. Miguel Riveira, a Brazilian safety specialist for an energy-services company who arrived with his wife and two children two years ago, launched Kalundborg’s first indoor soccer team in February, attracting several other Brazilian expats. Other new arrivals are collaborating with town leaders to plan a publicly funded youth center. “This is a big change, and it is happening fast,” says Mayor Damm. He’s an eyewitness as one industry—indeed, one company—forever changes this far corner of Europe.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story stated incorrectly that the Novo Nordisk Foundation receives 26% of the company’s revenue; in fact it receives a comparable share of the company’s dividends. Other passages have been edited to clarify the relationship between different Novo Nordisk entities.
This article appears in the April/May 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline “Ozempic’s boom times.”